CHAPTER 17 DISCUSSION:Educational Decree Number Twenty-Four

[Sea Change]

No: HPFGUIDX 97033


 Our Discussion leader (sorry, you didn't sign, so I'm embarrassed
that I don't know who you are)  posted: [huge snip] 

> As it turns out, when any boy sets foot on the stairs up to the girls
> dorm, the stairs form a slide, and the boy falls and slides back to 
> the Common Room.  Interestingly, the same doesn't happen when the
> girls try to get up to the boys dorms.  An old fashioned rule, 
> Hermione explains after sliding down to the Common Room. 
> 
> ~~Rowling spends more time discussing these stairs than she might
> have.  Is this important?  Will it become more important?  Or is 
> she simply expanding the new world of boys and girls that the
> characters are discovering?~~

_______________________

Sea Change responds to this:

This section actually read oddly to me, because any boys in my junior
high school and high school (including me!) would have taken quite
delightedly to this kind of stairs.  We would be daring each other to
climb them, bragging to each other about just how far up we got
(including the huge status of knowing a salient visual detail that a
girl could confirm), and sometimes just climb them for the fun of
repeatedly sliding down and re-starting the alarms, over and over.

It's also puzzling to me from a canon point of view.  This can't have
been the very first time any boy had ever tried this, and it would
have created a school-wide stir, so how come Ron doesn't know?  Even
more puzzling, is that his action seems to be penalty-free.


[some more snipping of interesting canon and other questions Sea
Change has no particular opinion about]

 Another discussion question:
> ~~Do you think Hermione's idea to jinx the parchment was a clever
> safety measure or a low trick?  Or both?  What does it tell us 
> about the nature of Hermione?~~

___________________

Sea Change responds:

I am wondering about how it could be a safety measure.  It would only
work as one if the person told someone who was not an authority
figure, or who was but wouldn't care.  This is something of a risk,
isn't it?  Alternatively, Hermione could have also attached a warning
spell that would have alerted her (or even better, which caused the
protean galleons to emit a warning!) when and only when the 'S N E A
K' spell went off, but she didn't.  

To me, it is an expansion of Hermione's taste for vengeance, which we
saw before when she trapped Ms Skeeter.


Sea Change, who would have used some sort of my 'specialty with
portable waterproof fires' on this, if he was Hermione